DeConick A.D

252
SPIRITUAL AVATARS
chanting to the Mother Silence. His church still concluded their prayers
with the traditional “Amen,” but they did so to harness the entire power
of the divine world. So, unlike the other Valentinian leaders, Marcus did
not have a dual-level church with rituals and creeds that catered to the Apostolic
Catholics. The people who came into his church came to join the
Gnostic initiated. They were seeking Gnostic redemption from the start.
Marcus was the first to build a pneumatic (spiritual) Gnostic church.
Those who joined his church did so not through psychic baptism but
through Gnostic initiation, when they ascended to the transcendent world
and united with their avatar angels, when they were perfected.
As might be imagined, Marcus was extremely popular with women
because his random selection of service leaders made it equally likely for
women or men to be leaders and prophets in his church. This was not
the case in the Apostolic Catholic churches, where leadership had been
restricted to men, in a very limited hierarchal structure. So it is not surprising
that Bishop Irenaeus complains that a number of leading women
withdrew their membership from the Apostolic Catholic church and
joined Marcus’s congregation.
One particular situation seems to have been the tipping point for Irenaeus.
One of Irenaeus’s deacons had Marcus over for dinner. It wasn’t
long after this that the deacon’s wife left the Apostolic Catholic church for
Marcus’s. She eventually became so involved in the ministry of Marcus’s
church that she traveled on missions with him. The situation became so
tense that a committee of elders from Irenaeus’s church went after her,
persuading her “with no small difficulty” to return to the Catholic church
and to make a public confession about how she had been sexually seduced
and then abused by Marcus. Why else would a fine Apostolic Catholic
woman have joined Marcus’s church and traveled around with him (Irenaeus,
1.13.4–5)?
It was his frustration with Marcus’s charisma and success as a church
leader that prompted Irenaeus to set the record straight and damn the
Gnostic Christians by writing his book Against the Heresies . The irony
is that Irenaeus’s intent to destroy Marcus and his friends resulted in the
preservation of information about them, ensuring the survival of Gnostic
spirituality over the centuries, even when the books of the Gnostics themselves
were banned and burned.